Martha Ward

THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
Sunday, March 28, 2004
by Michael Rose
Contributing Writer

"UNO professor Martha Ward uses rigorous scholarship to chip away at myth, deciphering what we can and cannot know about Marie Laveau mere et fill

". . . Ward does utilize the Creole folklore, often referred to as gumbo ya-ya, concerning the voodoo queens that circulated both then and now. But, in contrast to may previous accounts, she handles those materials carefully. Like Donald Marquis, whose classic work "In Search of Buddy Bolden: The First Man of Jazz," reconstructed the life of another fabled New Orleanian, Ward uses rigorous scholarship to chip away at accreted myth and deciphers what we can and cannot know about the Laveaus. In the process, her book restores both Marie Laveaus to their rightful places as women who used faith to resist oppression. "

THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
Laveau's life one of substance
by Lolis Eric Elie
TIMES-PICAYUNE Columnist

"Now comes before us Martha Ward and her new book, 'Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau.'

"Double trouble

". . . In one chapter, titled "Catholic in the Morning, Voodoo by Night," Ward tries to capture the strange duality that many Creoles exemplified.

"In the matter of race, they were both African and European. In the matter of religion, they were also African and European, voodoo and Catholic. This disturbed the authorities, who feared that the power of African faith could be used to incite slave revolts.

"Live woman talking

"According to Ward, Marie Laveau's Catholic life mirrored that of an anti-death penalty crusader of our time. 'She had a special ministry, just like Sister Helen Prejean,' Ward said. "She counseled the men on death row."

"The prison officials believed that she was a good, devout, Catholic woman and they basically let her have the run of death row. She brought art supplies, and she also put up an altar with a statue of Santa Maria, the Holy Mother, on top."

BOOKLIST
Ward, Martha. Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau. Mar. 2004. 224p. illus. index. Univ. Press of Mississippi, $28 (1-57806-629-8) 299.6

Two commanding Creole women reigned supreme in New Orleans between the 1820s and 1880s, the spiritual leader Marie Laveau and her similarly gifted daughter of the same name. Ward, an indomitable researcher and inspired interpreter, not only tells the entire astonishing and moving story of the two Marie Laveaus, but also offers a fresh perspective on Creole culture and Voodoo New Orleans style, a religion of the African Diaspora that, as Ward so sensitively explains, was crucial to the survival of African Americans during the grim days of slavery. Official documentation of the lives of Marie the Fist and Marie the Second is scant and confusing, but Ward brilliantly deciphers evidence of the shrewd strategies the Laveaus employed in order to conduct the Voodoo gatherings so essential to practitioners and so feared and demonized by the white establishment, and, most critically, to help free slaves. Citing numerous sources new to history books, Ward brings tumultuous nineteenth-century New Orleans vividly to life as she reveals the true nature of the equally maligned and mythologized Marie Laveaus, devotional, dramatic, and subversive women of otherworldly power and courage who saved numerous lives, and made live livable for may more.
Donna Seman